Something more personal for SWE 🙃
hello darkness, you are not my friend
there is some comfort in knowing,
i am not exceptional.
i don’t want to be exceptional right now,
i longingly look at another’s life,
and wish it were mine.
maybe i will be happy just doing a waitressing job?
or any other job that isn’t so demanding.
but the depths of darkness whisper:
you are just not strong to tahan.
there is some comfort in knowing,
my temptations are common to man,
many are the days we long wishfully,
to be at one with our beds.
hello darkness, you are not my friend.
hello darkness, you tell me that i am but man
I wrote in this in a fog of discouragement and some disillusionment about my research. In character with my Connectedness strength and social working everything, I began thinking about mental health and how it affects those with scarce resources (low-income, low-wage migrant workers, poor international students in an expensive foreign land etc), as I looked ahead to the impending storms and stressors in the last lap of the PhD.
As I struggled with the compounded effects of work stress, emotional storms and some worries about finances, I could really begin to relate to the different ways that people use to cope- albeit in a far-removed way. Why I say far-removed is because at the end of my anxieties, I knew that I had different safety nets to fall back on in the ‘worse come to worst’ situation.
The lens of privilege is helpful in this sense- not to incite guilt in those “more privileged”, but to engender a healthy dose of humility and empathy. Humility because once one is convinced at how much of the resources and opportunities one has is inherited or by some luck of draw (or blessings, from the eyes of the Christian faith), together with the capitalistic system that reinforces the aforementioned inequality, then one can also see that the lack of these are at least partially, through no fault of the person.
It can be easy for us to agree with the above consciously, but I think a lot of our mindsets and automatic thoughts on issues or people reveal otherwise. I know that is the case for me. I feel like it is a constant learning journey to truly see ourselves as interconnected people in relation to the refugees, the flood victims, the internally displaced, or even just the migrant worker or needy person at our doorstep. Ever onwards against a dysfunctional hegemony 🚶🏻♀️
Social Working, Everything 